Reflections of post-WafteriEate journalism.

THE IDIOT CULTURE
By Carl Bernstein
I
t is now nearly a generation since the drama that
began with the Watergate break-in and ended with
the resignation of Richard Nixon, a fuU twenty years
in which the American press has been engaged in a
strange frenzy of self-congratulation and defensiveness
about its performance in that afiair and afterward. The
self<ongratulation is not justified; the defensiveness,
alas, is. For increasingly the America rendered today in
the American media is illusionary and delusionary—<lis-
figured, unreal, disconnected from the true context of
our Uves. In covering actually existing American life, the
media—^weekly, daily, hourly—break new ground in get-
ting it wrong. The coven^e is distorted by celebrity and
the worship of celebrity; by the reduction of news to gos-
sip, which is the lowest form of news; by sensationalism,
which is always a turning away from a society's real con-
dition; and by a political and social discourse that we—
the press, the media, the politicians, and the people—
are turning into a sewer.
Let's go back to Watergate. There is a lesson there, par-
ticularly about the press. Twenty years ago, on June 17,
1972, Bob Woodwaixl and I began covering the Watei^te
story for The Washington Post. At the time of the break-in,
there were about 2,000 full-time reporters working in
Washington, D.C, according to a study by the Columbia
University School of Journalism. In the first six months
afterward, America's news organizations assigned only
fourteen of those 2,000 men and women to cover the
Watergate story on a fiill-time basis. And of those four-
teen, only six were assigned to the story on what might be
called an "investigative" basis, that is, to go beyond
recording the obvious daily statements and court pro-
ceedings, and try to find out exactly what had happened.
Despite some of the mythology that has come to sur-
round "investigative" journalism, it is important to
remember what we did and did not do in Watergate. For
what we did was not, in truth, very exotic. Our actual
work in uncovering the Watergate story was rooted in
the most basic kind of empirical poUce reporting. We
relied more on shoe leather and common sense and
respect for the truth than anything else—on the princi-
ples that had been drummed into me at the wonderful
CARL BERNSTEIN is the author most recently of Loyalties: A
Son's Memoir (Simon and Schuster).
old Washington Star. Woodward and I were a couple of
guys on the Metro desk assigned to cover what at bottom
was still a burglary, so we applied the only reportorial
techniques we knew. We knocked on a lot of doors, we
asked a lot of questions, we spent a lot of time listening:
the same thing good reporters from Ben Hecht to Mike
Berger tojoe Uebling to the yoimg Tom Wolfe had been
doing for years. As local reporters, we had no covey of
highly placed sources, no sky's-the-Iimit expense
accounts with which to court the powerful at fancy
French restaurants. We did our work far from the
enchanting world of tbe rich and the famous and the
powerful. We were grunts.
So we worked our way up, interviewing clerks, secre-
taries, administrative assistants. We met with them out-
side their offices and at their homes, at night and on
weekends. The prosecutors and the FBI interviewed the
same people we did, but always in their offices, always in
the presence of administration attorneys, never at home,
never at night, never away from jobs and intimidation
and pressures. Not surprisingly, the FBI and the Justice
Department came up with conclusions that were the
opposite of our own, choosing not to triangulate key
pieces of information, because they had made what the
acting FBI director ofthe day, L. Patrick Gray III, called "a
presumption of regularity" about the men around the
president of the United States.
Even our colleagues in the press didn't take our
reporting seriously, until our ordinary methodology
turned up some extraordinary (and incontrovertible)
information: a tale of systematic and illegal political espi-
onage and sabotage directed from the White House,
secret funds, wiretapping, a team of "plumbers"—bur-
glars—^working for the president of the United States.
And then ofthe cover-up, an obstruction of justice that
extended to the president himself.
It is important to remember also the Nixon admini-
stration's response. It was to make the conduct of the
press the issue in Watergate, instead ofthe conduct ofthe
president and his men. Day after day the Nixon White
House issued what we came to call the "non-denial":
asked to comment on what we'd reported. Press Secre-
tary Ron Ziegler, House Minority Leader Jerry Ford, or
Senate Republican leader Bob Dole would attack us as
purveyors of hearsay, character assassination, and innu-
22 lliE NEW REPUBUC JUNE S, IBK
endo without ever addressing tUe specifics of our stories.
"The sources of The Washington Po.v/are a fountain of mis-
information," the Wbite House responded wben we
reported tbat the president's closest aides controlled tbe
secret funds tbat had paid for the break-in and a perva-
sive cover-up (not to mention John Mitchell's inspired
words tome: "If you print that, Katie Graham's gonna get
her titcaugbtin a big fat wringer...").
Rather than disappearing after Watergate, the Nixon-
ian tecbnique of making the press tbe issue reached new
heights of cleverness and cynicism during tbe Reagan
administration, and it flourishes today. Hence Reagan's
revealing statement
about the sad and
sorry events that rav-
aged bis presidency in
the Iran-contra affair:
"What is driving me up
the wall is that this
wasn't a failure until
the press got a tip from
that rag In Beirut and
began to play it up.
This whole thing boils
down to a great irre-
sponsibility on the
part of the press."
And now in George
Bush we have still an-
other president ob-
sessed with leaks and
secrecy, a president
who could not under-
stand why the press
considered it news
when his men set up a
faked drug bust in
Lafayette Square across
from the Wliite House,
"Whose side are you
on?" he asked. It was a
truly Nixonian ques-
tion. This contempt for
tbe press, passed on to
bundreds of officials
who hold public office
today—including Bush, may be the most important and
lasting legacy of the Nixon administration.
In retrospect, tbe Nixon administration's extraordi-
nary campaign to undermine the credibility of the press
succeeded to a remarkable extent, despite all the post-
Watergate posturing in our profession. It succeeded in
large part because of our own obvious shortcomings.
The hard and simple fact is that our reporting has not
been good enough. It was not good enougb in the Nixon
years, it got worse in the Reagan years, and it is no better
now. We are arrogant. We have failed to open up our
own institutions in the media to the same kind of
scrutiny that we demand of other powerful institutions
in tbe society. Wt are no more forthcoming or gracious
ROSS PKKOT. E' Rt Sl Dr . NTl Al . (.: A N I) I D A IF.
in acknowledging error or misjudgment than the con-
gressional miscreants and bureaucratic felons we spend
so mucb time scrutinizing.
The greatest felony in the news business today (as
Woodward recently observed) is to be behind, or to miss,
a major story; or more precisely, to seem behind, or to
seem in danger of missing, a major story. So speed and
quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for
accuracy and context. The pressure to compete, the fear
that somebody else will make the splash first, creates a
frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information
is presented and serious questions may not be raised;
and even in those for-
tunate instances in
which such questions
are raised (as hap-
pened after some of
tbe egregious stories
about the Clinton
family), no one has
done the weeks and
months of work to sort
it aU out and to answer
them properly.
Reporting is not
stenography. It is the
best obtainable ver-
sion ofthe truth. The
really significant
trends in journalism
bave not been toward
a commitment to the
best and the most
complex obtainable
version of the trutb,
not toward building a
new journalism based
on serious, tboughtful
reporting. Those are
certainly not the pri-
orities tbat jump out
at the reader or tbe
viewer from Page One
or "Page Six" of most
of our newspapers;
and not what a viewer
gets when he turns on tbe 11 o'clock local news or, too
often, even network news productions.
"All right, was it really the best sex you ever had?"
Those were the words of Diane Sawyer, in an interview of
Maria Maples on "Prime Time Live," a broadcast of ABC
News (where "more Americans get their news from ...
tban any otber source"), Those words marked a new low
(out of whicb Sawyer herself has been busily climbing).
For more than fifteen years we have been moving away
from real journalism toward the creation of a sleazoid
info-tainment culture in which the lines between Oprab
and Phil and Geraldo and Diane and even Ted, between
the New York Post and Newsday, are too often indistin-
guishable. In this new culture of journalistic dtiUation, we
24 THE NEW REPUBLI C JUNE 8,1992
teach our readers and our viewers that the trivial is signif-
icant, that the lurid and the loopy are more important
than real news. We do not serve our readers and viewers,
we pander to them. And we condescend to them, giving
them what we think they want and wbat we calculate will
sell and boost ratings and readership. Many of them,
sadly, seem to justify our condescension, and to kindle at
the trash. Still, it is the role of journalists to challenge
people, not merely to amuse them.
We are in the process of creating, in sum, what
deserves to be called tbe idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-
culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the
surface and wbich can
provide harmless fun;
but the culture itself
For the first time in
our history the weird
and the stupid and the
coarse are becoming
our cultural norm,
even our cultural
ideal. Last month in
New York we witnessed
a primary election in
whicb "Donahue,"
"Imus in the Morn-
ing," and the disgrace-
ful coverage of the
New York Daily News
and the New York Post
eclipsed The New York
Times, The Washington
Post, tbe network news
divisions, and the seri-
ous and experienced
political reporters on
the beat. Even The
New York Times has
been reduced to nam-
ing the rape victim in
tbe Willie Smitb case;
to putting Kitty Kelley
on tbe front page as a
news story; to parlay-
ing poUs as if tbey were
policies.
I do not mean to attack popular culture. Good jour-
nalism is popular culture, but popular culture that
stretches and informs its consumers rather tban that
which appeals to the ever descending lowest common
denominator. If, by popular culture, we mean expres-
sions of thought or feeling that require no work of those
wbo consume them, then decent popular journalism is
finished. What is happening today, unfortunately, is that
the lowest form of popular culture—lack of information,
misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the
truth or the reality of most people's lives—has overrun
realjournaUsm.
Today ordinary Americans are being stuffed with
garbage: by Donahue-Geraldo-Oprah freak shows (cross-
GERALDO RIVERA, TELEV ISI O N J O U RN ALIST
dressing in the marketplace; skinheads at your corner
luncheonette; pop psychologists rhapsodizing over tbe
airways about the minds of serial killers and sex offend-
ers); by the Maury Povich news; by "Hard Copy"; by
Howard Stern; by local newscasts that do special seg-
ments devoted to hyping hype. Last month, in sup-
posedly sophisticated New York, the country's biggest
media market, there ran a craven five-part series on the
11 o'clock news called "Where Do They Get Those Peo-
ple . . . ?, " a special report on where Geraldo and Oprab
and Donahue get their freaks (the promo for the series
featured Donahue interviewing a diapered man with a
pacifier in his mouth).
The point is not
only that this is trash
journalism. Tbat
mucb is obvious. It is
also essential to note
that this was on an NBC-
owned and -operated
station. And who dis-
tributes Geraldo? The
Tribune Gompany of
Chicago. Who owns
the stations on which
these cross-dressers
and transsexuals and
skinheads and lawyers
for serial kiUers get to
strut their stuff? Tbe
networks, the Wash-
ington Post Company,
dozens of major news-
papers that also own
television stations,
Times-Mirror and the
New York Times Com-
pany, among others.
And last month Ivana
Trump, perhaps the
single greatest cre-
ation of the idiot cul-
ture, a tabloid artifact
if ever there was one,
appeared on the cover
of Vanity Fair. On the
cover, that is, of Conde Nast's flagship magazine, the same
Conde Nast/Newhouse/Random House whose execu-
tives will yield to nobody in their solemnity about their
profession, wbo will tell you long into the night how seri-
ously in touch with American culture they are, how seri-
ous they are about the truth.
Look, too, at what is on The New York Times best-seller
list these days. Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story ofthe
Mobster Who Controlled America by Sam and Chuck Gian-
cana, Warner Books, $22.95. (Don't forget that $22.95.)
This book is a fantasy pretty much from cover to cover. It
is riddled with inventions and lies, with conspiracies that
never happened, with misinformation and disinforma-
continued on page 28
JUNE a, 1992 THE NEW REPUBLIC 25
tion, aU designed to line somebody's pockets and satisfy
the twisted egos of some fame-hungry relatives of a mob-
ster. But this book has been published by Warner Books,
part of Time Warner, a conglomerate I 've been associated
with for a long time. (-4// the President's Men is a Warner
Bros, movie, the paperback oi All the President's Men was
also published by Warner Books, and I've just finished
two years as a correspondent and contributor at Time.)
Surely the publisher of Time has no business publishing a
book,that its executives and its editors know is a historical
hoax, with no redeeming value except financial.
By now the defenders of the institutions that I am
attacking will have cried the First Amendment. But this is
not about the First Amendment, or about free expres-
sion. In a free country, we are free for trash, too. But the
fact that trash will always find an outlet does not mean
that we should always furnish it with an outiet. And the
great information conglomerates of this country are now
in the trash business. We aU know pornography when we
see it, and of course it has a right to exist. But we do not
all have to be porn publishers; and there is hardly a
major media company in America that has not dipped its
toe into the social and political equivalent of the porn
business in the last fifteen years.
Many, indeed, are now waist-deep in the big muddy.
Take Donahue. Eighteen years ago Woodward and I
went to Ohio on our book tour because we were told that
there was a guy doing a syndicated talk show there who
was the most substantive interview in the business. And
he was. Donahue had read our book. He had charts, he
knew the evidence, be conducted a serious discussion
about the impUcations of Watergate for the country and
for the media. Last month, however, Donahue put Bill
Clinton on his show—and for half an hour engaged in a
mud wrestiing contest that was even too much for the
studio audience. Donahue was among those interviewed
for that WNBC special report about "Where Do They Get
Those People . . . ?, " and on that report he uttered a
damning extenuation to the effect that as Oprah and the
others get farther out there, he too has to do it.
Yes, we have always had a sensational, popular, yellow
tabloid press; and we bave always had gossip columns,
even powerful ones like Hedda Hopper's and Walter
Winchell's. But never before have we had anything like
today's situation in which supposedly serious people—I
mean the so-called intellectual and social elites of this
country—Uve and die by (and actually believe!) these
columns and these shows and millions more rely upon
them for their primary source of information. Liz Smith,
Newsday's gossip columnist and the best of a bad lot, has
admitted blithely on more than a few occasions that she
doesn' t try very hard to check the accuracy of many of her
items, or even give the subjects of her coltimn the oppor-
tunity to comment on what is being said about them.
For the eight years of the Reagan presidency, the
press failed to comprehend that Reagan was a real
leader—however asleep at the switch he might have
seemed, however shallow his intellect. No leader since
FDR so changed the American landscape or saw his
vision of the country ajid the world so thoroughly
implanted. But in the Reagan years we in the press
rarely went outside Washington to look at the relation-
ship between policy and legislation and judicial
appointments to see how the administration's policies
were affecting the people—the children and the adults
and the institutions of America: in education, in the
workplace, in the courts, in the black community, in the
family paycheck. In our ridicule of Reagan's rhetoric
about tiie "evil empire," we failed to make the connec-
tion between Reagan's poUcies and the willingness of
Gorbachev to loosen the vise of communism. Now the
record is slowly becoming known. We have, in fact,
missed most of the great stories of our generation, from
Iran-contra to the savings and loan debacle.
The failures of the press have contributed immensely
to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public
discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.
We now have a mainstream press whose news agenda is
increasingly infiuenced by this netherworld. On the day
that Nelson Mandela returned to Soweto and the aUies of
World War II agreed to the unification of Germany, the
front pages of many "responsible" newspapers were
devoted to the divorce of Donald and Ivana Trump.
Now the apotheosis of this talk-show culture is before
us. I refer to Ross Perot, a candidate created and sus-
tained by television, launched on "Larry King Live,"
whose willingness to bluster and to pose is far less in tune
with the workings of liberal democracy than with the
sumo-pundits of 'The McLaughlin Group," a candidate
whose only substantive proposal is to replace representa-
tive democracy with a live TV talk show for the entire
nation. And this candidate, who has dismissively
deflected all media scrutiny with shameless assertions of
his own ignorance, now leads both parties' candidates in
the polls in several major states.
Today the most compelling news story in the world is
the condition of America. Our political system is in a
deep crisis; we are witnessing a breakdown ofthe comity
and the community that has in the past allowed American
democracy to build and to progress. Surely the advent of
the talk-show nation is a part of this breakdown. Some
good journalism is stiU being done today, to be sure, but it
is the exception and not the rule. Good journaUsm
requires a degree of courage in today's climate, a quality
now in scarce supply in our mass media. Many current
assumptions in America—about race, about economics,
about the fate of our cities—need to be challenged, and
we might start with the media. For, next to race, the story
of the contemporary American media is the great uncov-
ered story in America today. We need to start asking the
same fundamental questions about the press that we do
ofthe other powerful institutions in this society—about
who is served, about standards, about self-interest and its
eclipse ofthe public interest and the interest of truth. For
the reality is that the media are probably the most power-
ful of all our institutions today; and they are squandering
their power and ignoring their obligation. They—or
more precisely, we—have abdicated our responsibility,
and the consequence of our abdication is the spectacle,
and the triumph, ofthe idiot culture. •
28 THE NEW REPUBLIC JUNES, 1992